


Turbo Killer

by Ringshadow



Category: Deadpool (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, HYDRA experimentation, Justin is not stupid, listen to some retrowave while reading this pls, mashes a bunch of stuff into the blender and pushes go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 16:58:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13574943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ringshadow/pseuds/Ringshadow
Summary: Justin Hammer thought he was fucked over when he got sent to prison. He was so very wrong.





	Turbo Killer

**Author's Note:**

> Blame tumblr for this, I guess. In Agents of SHIELD it was revealed that HYDRA, via SHIELD, liked to experiment on SHIELD’s prisoners. SHIELD had a part in busting Justin Hammer. Deadpool the movie revealed that you can push a mutation, and even though it's not MCU that certainly seems like something HYDRA would be interested in.
> 
> I'm a long-time fan of Knight Rider, and spent a little while obsessed with the Turbo Killer music video by Carpenter Brut and Ickerman. This was the result. I actually wrote this a while back but I touched it up a little and still really like it, so fuck it, here's the most alternative universe Justin Hammer you might ever see.

Honestly Justin had kind of suspected he was fucked the moment a SHIELD agent sat down across from him in prison.

 

Well, it was a 50/50 thing. This was either going to vastly improve his situation or end up killing him. He was sitting in a meeting room, in cuffs even though he was pretty goddamn sure the agent could kill him a dozen ways with a paperclip. They just talked, at first. Justin was willing to do that, though he’d flatly stated to start out that yeah, nothing’s free, man.

 

That had deeply amused the agent, and he’d gotten a good amount of cash on his commissary in return for his cooperation. That was enough to make him willing to talk then, and future times. He was pretty sure they had a minute by minute timeline of the events after the Monaco race as well as every single thought he’d had in his coke-pushed sleep-deprived brain at that time.

 

When he’d said he wasn’t sure what else to tell them, they’d asked if he could replicate the armor designs. Well yeah, probably? Didn’t they have those files? Of course they had, but that wasn’t the point, and over the course of a few meetings he was able to CAD up some of it and talk about what he’d wanted versus what had happened, and finally just lay out the fact that he was pretty sure having entire armored units in the military was a pipe dream at this point. The cost per soldier was just too high. Single operatives maybe, black book versions of Iron Man.

 

At that point he’d been comfortable for a few weeks. He and the only good friend he’d made in prison, because yeah he was sharing his commissary money. Why not, he thought. The meetings stopped for a while though the money didn’t, and he thought that as the end of it. He’d whored out what little of his brain was useful, they’d paid him sparingly, and even that was probably generous given he was a convict. Then one day SHIELD quietly came and pulled him out of prison for a transfer, and he still wasn’t willing to hedge his bets either way on that 50/50.

 

The agents transferring him weren’t forthcoming, though they did give him some slightly better clothes to wear. He ended up meeting with Peirce, one of the men that actually ran the agency and something about him made Justin’s stomach turn to a tiny ball of ice. Of course he’d tried to deal like he’d once been able to, try to find himself a better hand hold or at least some protection in all this and Peirce had given him a half smile.

 

Yeah. He’s fucked.

 

But he’s also a fucking patriot so yeah, he tries to do what they ask. He keeps requests reasonable. He goes through potential weapon designs and designs for some of the fuck-off largest engines he’s ever seen and offers suggestions, designs a turret for them because he’s good at guns and they know that, and helps redesign a strange little flight engine, which is hard as hell because he never gets to see the power source.

 

Eventually they run out of shit they can assign him. He’s not useful anymore and ends up shackled again and for a split second, he almost relaxes. Transferred back to prison. Maybe with a reduced sentence. Maybe not. Maybe he should just be thankful for this working vacation.

 

The sharp jab to his neck is an indication that his paranoia had not run deep enough.

 

He’s not proud of his behavior for the next few days. Yeah, he begs, but what the fuck else can he do. He’s a civilian, he’s not a hardened target. He’s done everything they ask for, why are they doing this to him? Well, apparently they’d decided they’d gotten what they wanted out of his brain, so might as well use his body for something. He’s a convict, one that famously ended up in prison because he tangled with a superhero. No one’s going to look for him.

 

That’s about the time he realized they weren’t SHIELD.

 

Whatever they do to him it hurts. He knows surgery is involved. He flat out panics when he realizes they’re going to fuck with his eyes. At some point someone talks to him and said they had intended to just ship him back to prison but he’d been such a goddamn nice guy before prison and donated a lot of blood and they’d tracked some down and analyzed it, and he’s a lot more interesting than he knows.

 

Mostly he wants to die. He tells them to go fuck themselves. They laugh at him.

 

Time gets hazy, but eventually he’s moved, then half dragged, half carried off a stretcher and dumped on a cement floor. He hadn’t had the voice to really protest and had laid there a while, slowly coming back to his senses. He hurt, just all over, and while he could feel his own rabbiting pulse it felt like his heart had been yanked out of his chest, like he was hollow and something was missing. His hair had been buzzed off and touching his own head confirmed sutures. His vision? Strange. Good but a bit red-hazed, and in the relative dim of what was apparently a mostly empty warehouse, a bright plume was the first sign that shit was officially whack.

 

The bright mark on his vision was a heat source, an engine, and he blinked his eyes clear and sat up. Dry heaved, a few times, but got up to his knees. It was a car. A Challenger by the front profile, idling low and throaty in a way that indicated it had anything but a stock engine. It was dim enough he couldn’t see into the tinted out interior to see a driver.

 

Then the headlights clicked on and it was like icepicks into his skull, and the engine revved. He was too busy curling forward in agony to move when he felt the car peel out, and honestly, being killed by an American muscle car would be a bizarre end to this, but one he’d be fine with.

 

Then something shifted in his head, hot and molasses slow even as the car sped at him, and it was new and alien and utterly familiar and he said _stop_.

 

Thought it, anyway, but the car slammed the brakes and ended up idling inches from him, towering over his curled-prone form like a mechanical monster. He’d just sighed and rested his forehead against the front bumper for a moment, and stayed there as a few things came to him, so sure they may have been carved in stone.

 

The ache in his chest was gone. The missing thing was the car. The car was his. No, the car was _him_.

 

He’d used the front of the car to get up, staring at it, and the driver’s door had clicked open, the interior lights going on. It was empty. Not that that meant anything he was sure that remote-controlling a car wasn’t beyond the ability of SHIELD, or.. he doesn’t want to say HYDRA but, yeah, why avoid the thought when he’s pretty sure that’s who had him by his balls.

 

But like he knew the other things, he knew the car wasn’t under remote, so he got in. The controls had steering wheel and that’s where it ended, because it had a throttle and a gearshift, and the wheel itself was more like a pilot’s controls for a plane. The dashboard was a mess of screens and headsup displays. He inventoried it, knew it already. Anticipated when text flowed over one of the screens.

 

Designation requested, it said.

 

“Pleasure.” He said after a beat. “Your name is Pleasure.”

 

* * *

 

It was a stupid, fucked up thing once they explained it to him. He was an experiment that was probably supposed to have died. They were aware Stark used an AI build to help fly the Iron Man suits. They were playing with the concept. They hadn’t wanted to try it on actually expensive vehicles, so a god damn flying car had been put together, stolen from Howard Stark designs. Which he’d fixed the engine for. Which he’d designed a primary weapon for. It wouldn’t have even worked, except for one, crucial point: he was latent X-factor. He had been an inert mutant, could probably have passed it to his kids and been none the wiser, but some very unsavory people had figured out that you could stress latent X-factor into expressing.

 

HYDRA had had a specific point, in all this ridiculous, 1980s villain insanity. They had wanted to stress him into mutating, and had tried to guide it by tying him to a support AI, and a car, to get a specific mutation. They were hoping he’d be able to get into computers and machines on command. They wanted an off switch for Iron Man. It didn’t work. Justin Hammer lived as a bitter parody of Knight Rider, but couldn’t do what they wanted so, fuck it, anyway, they’d use him in the capacity he had.

 

He was a fucking superhero (villain?) getaway driver, and he was mind/soul/body melded to the vehicle. He was the only one that could drive the Challenger, a car that had an only tangential relationship with gravity and physics. Yeah, it flew. It was the SR71 on tires, a monster on wheels and it was only his. Oh, and they’d blow it up and kill him if he fled. They were going to give him missions. He was going to do them. There was no choice in this matter.

 

He wondered, idly, if he was actually still alive or of this was the last drifting thoughts of his dying brain. He still wasn’t willing to bet on the odds.

 

* * *

 

Stark found him. By accident, waiting at a predetermined extraction point. Sitting on Pleasure’s hood and smoking a cigarette, wearing wraparound sunglasses to hide the clusterfuck that were his eyes now. Pleasure’s HUDs were superfluous, his eyes did it for him, his sped-up brain eating up what he was seeing. Letting him see enough to drive a rocket ship of a car and not pancake him and whatever operative was using him as a fancy-ass undercover cab service into the nearest wall. Which would probably break the wall but they wouldn’t be any less dead.

 

Stark, for his part, just stared for a few beats. Obviously knew and recognized him, but hadn’t parsed the situation yet. Justin blew out smoke and stared back. “Walk away, Anthony.”

 

Stark responded by walking over and sitting on the hood next to him. Pleasure revved, once. Contact from a not-component and not-mission-objective. Stark looked at the vehicle, squinted at the windshield, then at Justin. “So.”

 

“I can’t say anything and you can’t help me. Unless you feel like putting a bullet in my skull I guess. But you don’t do that.”

 

“JesusFUCK, man.”

 

“Mmn.”

 

Silence, for a few moments, then Tony elbowed him to point out some guys walking down the street toward them. Justin had seen them a block and a half out so he ignored the prompt. He did, however, laugh out loud when one of the men walked right up and pulled a gun.

 

“The FUCK is so funny? I look like a comedian?” The man demanded, bandana pulled up to partly obscure his face.

 

“I don’t have any money.” Justin took one last drag off the cig.

 

“Then give me your keys.”

 

“This car doesn’t have keys. It’s pushbutton start.” Not wrong, exactly. “And it’s not locked.”

 

“What the hell are you doing?” Tony wanted to know.

 

The thugs were already shoving their way into Pleasure, brief elation turning into loud confusion at the control scheme, and the fact that the engine immediately died and refused to restart. Then Pleasure locked the doors, put the windows up and began to scream.

 

Justin lit another cigarette and watched the doors reopen, the idiots collapsing out of the car with blood streaking the sides of their heads. “Go away.”

 

They staggered off.

 

He looked at Tony, daring him to say anything. When he didn’t, he sighed. “You need to leave before you actually get me killed and probably yourself too.”

 

“Am I just supposed to forget about this?”

 

“It’d be a good idea. Go. For once in your fucking life, listen to a word I say.”

 

Tony got off Pleasure’s hood, giving him a look Justin couldn’t read before he clapped his shoulder and walked away.

 

Justin knew that motion had put some kind of alien electronic on him. He left it, for the moment. Just to pretend someone gave a fuck about him as a person instead of the human body of a car.


End file.
